The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Cato Networks can now incorporate user identity and roles into SD-WAN policies.

Today's Full Stack Journey podcast peers into the future of security with guest James Holland. We talk about how security is moving up the stack, the use of automation, and what non-security folks can do to improve their organizations' security posture.

ArcOS from startup Arrcus is the latest network operating system to emerge for whitebox switching and routing. What does Arrcus bring to this crowded table?

The following is a transcript of the audio recording you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s July 16, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Arrcus late last week.

Who’s Arrcus?

Arrcus is a startup that’s built a modern network operating system for the disaggregated networking market. They are running on $15M of Series A funding, and as of today, they have emerged from stealth. In this briefing, Arrcus shared some of the details behind ArcOS, their core product offering. First off…

Why Arrcus And ArcOS?

Doesn’t the world have enough network operating systems, especially when you consider the open networking world? My impression of Arrcus is that they are not competing with the average open source networking solution. Instead, they see Cisco, Juniper, and Arista as their chief competition. Arrcus doesn’t want to be viewed as a commercialized open source NOS, because they aren’t. Arrcus built ArcOS from the ground up to work at the very highest levels of scalability, giving them a software platform to go after the established vendors with. There you go – why Arrcus exists.

Notice I didn’t say that Arrcus is making switches and bundling their NOS with it. And they aren’t. ArcOS is a disaggregation play, meaning you can mix and match switching hardware of your choice with ArcOS running on top. If you follow the disaggregated space, you’ll know that porting a NOS to this whitebox or that Ethernet chipset is not easy to do. Open & commercial disaggregated network operating systems have hardware compatibility lists for this reason. Therefore…

What Hardware Can You Run Arrcus’ ArcOS On?

According to Arrcus, just about anything. In fact, they made it clear in the briefing that they will run on loads of chipsets from Broadcom, Barefoot, Cavium, Innovium, Mellanox, and Nephos. They went so far as to say that ArcOS is the first OS to run on a couple of shiny new emerging chipsets from Broadcom.

How has ArcOS been ported to so many whitebox platforms while so many other disaggregated network operating systems struggle in this area? Arrcus answers that there’s magic in something they call DPAL, or dataplane adaptation layer. The way in which they wrote their DPAL gives them the ability to, with minimal engineering effort, bring new chipsets on board. So we know you can run ArcOS on a wide variety of hardware. Sounds great.

But What Is ArcOS All About As Network Operating System Software?

One feature of ArcOS that came up repeatedly is scalability. ArcOS is a “built from the ground up,” “clean-slate” product, and it was written to handle, among other things, massive ingestion of routes. One example cited brought in the entire Internet routing table and converged a total of 5M paths in 30 seconds. Another example was of bringing in 18M routes and settling in 3 minutes. So ArcOS scales big, and scales across cores for performance.

Architecturally, ArcOS has a run anywhere form factor. It can be deployed a VM or container, and of course on bare metal. And the platform is based on microservices, although we didn’t have a chance to get into any detail on that point. Microservices does underscore Arrcus’ point about per-module restartability, however. Feels like a modern style OS to me.

What about routing protocol daemons? Here again, Arrcus built their own from the ground up. For instance, they could have used Quagga or Free Range Routing open source code as a starting point, but for the way they wanted their daemons to run, it didn’t make sense to start with open source code. Instead, they built their protocol implementations from scratch.

Another key…

Russ White returns to the podcast to discuss the pros and cons of information hiding in the control plane.

Today on the Packet Pushers Priority Queue, we get nerdy about disaggregation, where you mix and match software from one vendor and hardware from another.

Our sponsor today is Cisco, and if you just did a double-take, that’s right, Cisco wants to talk to you about disaggregation, but there’s more to it than just hardware/software separation.

Joining us are Bhavna Prasad, Product Manager at Cisco; and Akshat Sharma, Technical Marketing Engineer for Cisco’s Service Provider BU.

We discuss the different kinds or degrees of disaggregation, and then drill into specifics around IOS-XR.

We also look at the programmatic capabilities and interfaces of IOS-XR, what hardware it’s available on, use cases, and more.

Show Links:

@XRDOCS – Cisco Systems

XRDOCS on Twitter

Akshat Sharma on Twitter

On today's IPv6 Buzz, we chat with Stephan Lagerholm of T-Mobile to learn about the uptake of IPv6 in mobile networks and why 464XLAT is a critical translation mechanism for mobile IPv6.

“Cloud native applications are designed to be managed by software in all stages. This includes ongoing health checks as well as initial deployments. Human bottlenecks should be eliminated as much as possible in the technology, processes, and policies.”

That quote is from the O’Reilly book Cloud Native Infrastructure. On today’s Datanauts episode, we talk to Justin Garrison, one of the authors and a senior systems engineer.

We dive into the chapter about managing cloud native applications, including a general conversation about the definition of a cloud-native app–that is, an application managed by software rather than humans.

Then we discuss the challenges of managing a microservices architecture, explore the concept of sidecar proxies, and walk through the process of deploying a new cloud application into production.

We also look at troubleshooting tools and techniques, and examine the necessity of service discovery and resource scheduling.

Sponsor: Linux Academy

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Show Links:

Cloud Native Infrastructure – O’Reilly

Justin Garrison on Twitter

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